From Subjective Certainty to Information Source: the Interpretation of Evidential and Epistemic Markers in Spanish-Speaking Children

This study investigated how Spanish-speaking children interpret events when confronted with evidential and epistemic markers. Seventy-two children aged four, six, and eight completed a narrative comprehension task involving three conditions: sincerity (linguistic and visual information aligned), trickery (conflicting information), and blind (linguistic information only). Results revealed clear age-related differences in interpretation. Four-year-olds showed higher accuracy with expressions of subjective certainty, whereas 6- and 8-year-olds were more accurate when evidential markers explicitly indicated the source of information, particularly in the blind condition. These findings point to an age-related shift from reliance on subjective certainty to greater sensitivity to source-based linguistic cues, even in a language such as Spanish that lacks grammaticalised evidentiality.